Analyzing the shortcomings of the US engineering education system is a growth industry. There have been numerous editorials, commission reports, commentaries, and complaints on the subject. Blame has been placed on every party in sight, including the secondary school system, television, uninvolved parents, high school science programs and teachers, legislators, high equipment cost, obsolete labora...
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Much is being made of "smart" cars navigating automatically on intelligent vehicle highway systems. The assumption is that progress in controls, communications, and computers has made technical solutions practical for the problem of highway congestion. The author argues that this hope may not always be realized by the Intelligent Vehicle Highway System (IVHS) programs being investigated in the Uni...
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The world's most populous democracy-home to almost a sixth of humanity-is on the move. With a huge technical workforce and a growing middle class, India is striving to integrate itself into the world economy. As it seeks a place among industrialised nations, it will undoubtedly become a model for other developing countries bent on using technology and science to do the same. This special report be...
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The author describes Orbit 1, an excellent example of high technology leveraging. While it provides support for original-equipment manufacturers and independent software vendors who use SunSoft products, SunSoft itself works on higher versions of its Solaris operating system. In effect, Orbit 1 interfaces the technology providers, like SunSoft, with those who package technology.<<ETX>>
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The peaceful application of atomic energy has a special place in independent India's technology development efforts, having been one of the first strategic technologies pursued on a grand scale for the sake of national self-sufficiency. To electrify more of the country and meet its needs for the foreseeable future, India has devised a three-stage plan. In the first and current stage, a series of p...
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The exacting requirements of India's space program have demanded the participation of industry on a large scale, so India has from the very beginning striven to involve its businesses in the endeavor. With all this diffusion of tasks, skills, techniques, and technologies, a vibrant and dynamic space industry has emerged that cuts across small, medium-sized, and large concerns in both public and pr...
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India is home to more than 850 million people, but to very few telephones. For every thousand inhabitants, it has only about eight phones, versus an average of 100 in the developing world, and 600 in developed countries. Here, the author describes how liberalization, in short, while forcing Indian manufacturers to compete against multinationals with state-of-the-art technologies, is opening up opp...
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Though it has its share of unique challenges, the Indian electronics industry is like those of more advanced countries in at least one way: a huge quantity of garden-variety electronics winds up in commercial and consumer products, but the most advanced applications are the almost exclusive province of Government establishments like defense. The authors describe how, interestingly, in electronics ...
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Keenly aware of the serious obstruction to future development, the Government of India has made generating capacity and transmission system additions a priority in its five year economic plans. The current plan, for the period 1992-97, originally envisioned an addition of 38,000 MW, or about 50 percent of India's installed capacity. This would raise peak power availability to just over 65,000 MW t...
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As system clock rates race to 100 MHz and beyond, designers of printed-circuit boards and multichip modules must watch out for such high-speed effects as ground bounce, ringing, reflections, and crosstalk. The author describes how today's high-speed printed-circuit boards and multichip modules require integrated design systems that include signal integrity analysis tools.<<ETX>>
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Too complex to be tested as a chip and too packaged to be probed like a board, the multichip module presents a new set of challenges to the test engineer. The author describes how, until dedicated testers are developed, applying board-type tests using an IC tester will prove to be the most effective test methodology.<<ETX>>
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"Do it right first time" is the slogan of systems engineering. The approach can benefit all types of development projects, from smaller commercial products to large government projects, because the objective is the same: to design a high-quality product as fast and efficiently as possible. The author describes how the key to this process is translating a customer's need into a set of specification...
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